MasterpieceMasterpiece: 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard' (1750)by Thomas Gray

Meditation on Mortality

By

John J. Miller

May 17, 2013 9:34 p.m. ET

Shortly afterAbraham Lincoln secured the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, a reporter traveled to Springfield, Ill., to learn about the candidate's background. In an interview, Lincoln said his early life could be condensed into a single phrase: "the short and simple annals of the poor."

ENLARGE

Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard' was a poem of uncommon power on grief and the afterlife.
Christopher Serra

The words didn't belong to Lincoln, but rather to the 18th-century English poet Thomas Gray, and they came from "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard." Lincoln almost certainly had encountered Gray's "Elegy" as a boy, possibly by one of those hearth fires in his family's log cabin.

There was a time when most educated people would have recognized Lincoln's reference: "Gray's Elegy," wrote Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), "includes more familiar phrases than any poem of equal length in the language." Its 32 stanzas burst with celebrated passages: "The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day"; "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen"; "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"; and so on. Robert L. Mack, Gray's definitive biographer, has observed that a recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations draws from 15 stanzas and reproduces 13 of them whole.

Gray was born the day after Christmas in 1716. He was one of a dozen children, but only he survived childhood. As a boy, he attended Eton College, and later he would write "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," a poem that is the source of what may be his best-known phrase of all: "where ignorance is bliss / 'Tis folly to be wise." Another poem, the amusing "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes," apparently recounts a true story involving an unfortunate feline owned by Gray's close friend Horace Walpole, a politician and writer.

For Gray, poems were the product of long, careful and hard work—and he often had trouble finishing what he started. In 1750, however, he sent a complete version of his "Elegy" to Walpole: "You will, I hope, look upon it in light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writings have wanted." He appears to have fiddled with the elegy for at least four years and possibly as many as eight.

It begins with a description of a rural cemetery in darkness, turning to the fates of the people who lie six feet below. Do their ranks include "some mute inglorious Milton"? The poem goes on to ponder the pain of grief, the challenge of commemoration and the mystery of what lies beyond this life.

As a meditation on human mortality, its theme is one of the most common in literature. Yet the poem possesses uncommon power. When Walpole received his copy, he seems to have recognized its merits at once. He behaved as a publicist, distributing the poem throughout London. It struck at a popular moment for "graveyard poetry," which mixed themes of death, gloom and Christian belief, prefiguring the coming Gothic movement. (Walpole, in fact, wrote what is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, "The Castle of Otranto," published in 1764.)

Yet Gray's "Elegy" also rose above the ghetto of a genre, expressing universal ideas in lines that worked their way into collective memory. Samuel Johnson didn't care for most of Gray's poetry, but even he confessed an admiration for the elegy, praising its "images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."

In 1759, on the night before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, British Gen. James Wolfe either recited the poem or listened to it read aloud (accounts vary). "I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow," he is reported to have said. Wolfe defeated the French the next day, but he famously perished in the effort, providing a testament to what may be the central truth of Gray's "Elegy": "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

It might be said that Gray's path of glory started at a grave—and very possibly one occupied by his aunt, Mary Antrobus. She died as Gray composed the elegy and was entombed in the churchyard of St. Giles, in the village of Stoke Poges, west of London. Gray attended church services there with his mother, and they would have routinely walked by his aunt's final resting place, in an activity that may have provided Gray with the determination to finish his poem.

Fans of the James Bond movies have caught a glimpse of the churchyard in the opening moments of "For Your Eyes Only." Bond, played by Roger Moore, lays roses by his wife's burial plot, in a scene filmed on the grounds that Gray immortalized. It looks a bit different from its appearance in Gray's life. In 1924, the locals tore down the owl-haunted, "ivy-mantled" tower, fearing its imminent collapse.

Another grave lies there too: the one belonging to Gray himself. "On some fond breast the parting soul relies, / Some pious drops the closing eye requires," he wrote in the elegy. Yet when he died in 1771, few people attended his funeral. As a lifelong bachelor, he had no wife or children to mourn him, and most of his friends didn't even know he had passed. Walpole learned of Gray's death from a newspaper.

His gravesite marker is modest. For a poet, however, Gray left behind the best kind of epitaph—one etched into a literary heritage.

—Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and national correspondent for National Review.

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